They sure don’t make whores like they used to. Today’s practitioners of the world’s oldest profession are unfortunately unglamorous Eastern European teenage girls brutally kidnapped and trafficked in a vast, impregnable drug-fueled network.
The “Madames” at the end of La belle epoque, however, were a much bigger deal entirely. As the opening sequence of the new Stephen Frears (The Queen) film, Chéri, gleefully informs us, courtesans were a dominant political and societal force in 1920s France, accumulating vast wealth and influence as they traveled through the villas and mattresses of European royals and elites.
A modern equivalent to this curious arrangement is hard to come by. But the situation was not unlike a legion of famed, profitable and entrepreneurial women like Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the D.C. madam, and Heidi Fleiss, the Hollywood madam, being granted near immunity and the ability to go about their affairs without scrutiny.
Chéri, based on a novel by the French author Colette, tells the story of such a Madame named Lea de Lonval (Michelle Pfeiffer, Stardust). Lonval – as a too playfully cutesy narrator notes – is about to retire and enjoy the monetary fruits of a long and distinguished career as an altogether exemplary courtesan.
She carries herself in a manner as regal as any queen – never falling in love and maintaining a fierce monetary and romantic independence from any man. In the opening of the film, Lonval even runs her hands over her gorgeously appointed silk sheets, closes her eyes and exclaims there is nothing so fine as an empty bed.
Predictably, these lifelong walls of aversion to intimacy are felled. What’s not quite so predictable, however, is who ends up doing the attacking and how the battle for her heart unfolds.
Instead of encountering a benevolent, Richard Gere-like, wealthy, middle-aged savior who proselytizes the virtues of monogamy and changing her whoring ways, Lonval becomes entangled with the young, callous lothario Cheri (Rupert Friend, The Young Victoria).
Theirs is an odd pairing. Cheri’s mother is a long retired courtesan colleague of Lonval’s, Madame Peloux (a limited and caricaturing Kathy Bates, Revolutionary Road) who, with a wink and a nod, recruits her close friend to tame Cheri, a 19-year-old master of “conscientious debauchery.”
The unseemliness of the age gap is compounded by the maternal relationship between the two. Cheri even grew up considering Lonval as a “godmother” of sorts. Yet both performers still bring a sense of symbiosis and balance to the partnership.
Some may find Friend’s cool, distant performance contrived, playing the classic brooding Casanova, but the cliché is largely deconstructed and commented upon. Perpetually posing, Friend is always leaning against doorways and coolly sipping cigarettes, inviting whoever is watching to admire his long, model legs or sinewy physique.
This is not a trite come-on so everyone can admire his dark, deep eyes, but rather a comment upon Cheri’s rampant egotism. It’s difficult to not feel an unhealthy degree of self regard when raised around doting women whose values all revolve around beauty.
Pfeiffer is equally sultry, but in a more refined, professional way. Her slow sizzle matches well with Friend’s casual randiness. Employing a perfect half-smile, Pfeiffer manages to suggest both a romantic distance, which allows Lonval to avoid becoming another token conquest to Cheri, and a clear affection for the blithe youth with whom she could easily spend languid weeks in bed.
When Frears is merely sketching the romps of his die-hard hedonists, he can keep Cheri skipping along at a pleasing pace, going from Paris to Normandy and back in quick succession. Frears becomes mired in much more troublesome emotional terrain when Cheri leaves Lonval behind for a million dollar marriage to a bland bride closer to his own age.
The trope of two casual lovers realizing there was more to their bond than initially suspected is tread and Chéri lapses into conventionality. Our protagonists, formerly above the fray of simple human courtship, suddenly start to leak, bursting into tears when nobody is looking and delivering heartfelt confessions.
Fortunately, there is a struggle to break from the stranglehold of romantic conventionality, and it too, is jarring after the audience is lulled into the love affair.
We are left with a gorgeously intimate and revealing close up of Pfeiffer’s torn, weathered face, still picturesque on the outside but ravished beneath the blush. This leads one to conclude, as with all exchanges with prostitutes, that a great performance was certainly delivered but not much else.
Vmain13@umd.edu
RATING: 3 out of 5 Stars
